« In Which We Grab The Hand Of The King »

Aegon's Handjob

by DICK CHENEY

Game of Thrones
creators David Benioff & D.B. Weiss
HBO, Sundays at 9pm

What a week. I feel like Phil Jackson looks. Since I'm now essentially retired from political life, my work schedule usually looks something like this:

Monday: Yoga. Complain about how boring The Killing is, masturbate, appear on Fox News. Sandwiches.

Tuesday: Pickup basketball at the rec center (our team is Jaime Lannister's Left Hand). Masturbate, criticize the president, masturbate.

Wednesday: Survivor. Screen a film for my grandkids, usually The Ghost and the Darkness. Masturbate. South Park, late snack with James Baker. Put on my Scar mask and scare the bejesus out of the kids by pouncing out of their closet and growling, "IF IT WEREN'T FOR YOU, MUFASA WOULD STILL BE ALIVE!" Gluten-free baked potato.

Thursday: PBS sting. Parks and Recreation. Popping Andrew Breitbart's tires to keep him paranoid. National Review. The Weekly Standard. Cat Fancy.

Friday: Off day.

This week, however, I had to get our ducks in order for the GOP nomination. You didn't think Karl Rove and I were going to let a rube like Donald Trump become president? Communism was only a red herring. Complicating matters was the fact that my number one sleeper candidate sadly comes from a broken home. We were about to cross him off our list until I remembered what Jon Snow was capable of, and I screamed at Karl, "You know nothing Jon Snow!"

Many of history's great men were bastards: Confucious, C-3P0, Alexander Hamilton, Scar, Leonardo Da Vinci, Jesus. Giving all out-of-wedlock children a particular surname is a nice touch, stolen presumably from the Plantagenets who formed the inspiration for most of George R.R. Martin's epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire.

Don't ask me who Aegon the Conqueror is modeled after, it hurts my feelings. Isn't it obvious? We have the same jawline.

I originally tried to conquer the Wyoming state house with a dragon named Balerion the Dread but he died of frostbite when I tied him to a fir tree outside McDonald's and I had to obtain political power by other means. Scar was my thinspiration after Balerion perished, and then I was sustained by the strength of my wife, Lynne the Terrible.

These are tough times. I tried to watch Treme last week and it turned into The Wire overnight. This would be an ideal development if it were 1996, but it is sadly no longer 1996. Also, everything on Treme feels like a thinly veiled insult directed at me, as does the entire existence of John Goodman and Samwell Tarly. The casting gods did not smile on Jon Snow's fat friend: Jonah Hill should have jumped all over that part, instead he now looks like a deflated balloon.

Game of Thrones really started to click last night. I can account for three potential causes for the improvement in the drama:

(1) During all of Daenarys' scenes, an inset of Khal Drogo's phallus (twice the winner of Penis of the Year at the Dothraki Emmys) was displayed half erect, and there was considerable tension as to how big exactly it could get. (Answer: .8 Michael J. Fox.)

(2) Robert Baratheon's bastard Genry turned out to be Chris from Skins, and

(3) Tyrion Lannister was finally put in an interesting situation. The dwarf who bangs whores was a cliche in Napoleon's time. Tyrion is more fascinating when he's talking his way out of a situation than when he's talking his way into one.

Lynne saw me watching Game of Thrones and sat down for a second. The following conversation ensued:

LYNNE: When does this take place?

ME: Smh

LYNNE: No, really?

ME: About three hundred years after Aegon's Landing.

LYNNE: In England?

ME: Christ. OK, do you know the doom of Valryia?

LYNNE: Was that Lady Gaga's name before she changed it?

ME: Did you order the Code Red?

LYNNE (softly): You're goddamn right I did.

The Doom of Valryia was, of course, the initial environmental catastrophe that forced the Targaryens from their ancestral home, where sex with hot wax was de rigeur. How history really unfolds is a major theme of Game of Thrones. Recounted in history books, it seems a pale imitation of how events really unfold without hindsight. Nazis were celebrated as well as feared throughout the world, but to think of it now the Third Reich seems like a nasty little zit on the face of the civilization.

It was far more than that and appealed to many more people. As did the Mad King Aerys, who had his supporters. The Targaryens always had loyalists, and in fact a few of them were decent men despite their incestuous bloodlines (dragons usually marry a sister or brother).

Aegon the Dragon - or Aegon the Conqueror as he was called in last night's episode - came to Westeros from Valyria, and his armies were made powerful by his three dragons. His brother Oryx was a bastard and helped him to his throne from his homebase of Dragonstone. Much of this backstory was revealed while the last dragon, Viserys Targaryen, was carnally entering a prostitute, I suppose as a way of getting the audience to sexually indulge historical details of a world that never existed.

The empowerment of Danys and Arya is what made Game of Thrones the remedy to the male-dominated Tolkien snoozefests. (Have you ever actually tried to read The Lord of the Rings? I'd rather read a book by Jerome Corsi.) Arya is such an awesome character that GRRM's wife told him she would file for divorce if he killed her off. Men are impotent weasels in GOT, women are the real protagonists of the drama.

The one thing GRRM screwed up until the sequels was the character of Catelyn Stark. We don't want to see her so easily taken in by Littlefinger, we can't sympathize with someone who would accuse a dwarf of murder without any proof, especially after he took the time to create a horse-riding apparatus for her disabled son. Game of Thrones is awesome because no one in it is stupid, and everything that happens in an unbelievable world is true to us.

On the page, we can never sympathize with Cersei Lannister, but on the screen, she is the jilted wife of an obese serial adulterer with an outstandingly attractive brother. Who could resist? Who doesn't want more for their children than they had themselves? No wonder she doesn't want her successor to be a ginger queen.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find the previous two Game of Thrones recaps here and here.

"Tiny Skeletons" - An Horse (mp3)

"Airport Death" - An Horse (mp3)

"Swallow the Sea" - An Horse (mp3)